Seidenader - Micro Focus

Customer Success Story
Silk Central
Caliber
StarTeam
Seidenader
Caliber, Silk Central™, and StarTeam® integrate to deliver 40%
improved efficiency while providing full traceability.
Overview
Seidenader develops and builds inspection
machines for pharmaceutical manufacturers.
It also provides customers with Track&Trace
Solutions for reliable traceability of their prod­
ucts and for protection against counterfeiting.
For the control and monitoring of complex man­
u­facturing and packaging lines Seidenader de­
velops automation and IT solutions.
Challenge
Economic necessities and statutory require­
ments are causing pharmaceutical companies
worldwide to get to grips with product piracy,
product losses and the so-called gray market.
They are concentrating on consistent identifica­
tion and traceability of their products through
integration of Track&Trace solutions into their
existing and new packaging lines. Unambiguous
identification happens in three stages:
“Using Caliber, Silk Central, and
StarTeam, we have already noticed
an increase in reuse of requirements
and test cases which was not
possible before. We are able to free
up resources to cover our increasing
work load and I estimate that we will
be able to improve our efficiency
by 40% within two years.”
CHRISTIAN FRENZ
Product Manager of the Track&Trace Business Unit
Seidenader
Print + Inspection—Coding of the sales unit
with variable production-relevant data (e.g.
batch numbers and expiration dates), and
inspection of the printed information.
Serialization—Coding of the sales unit with
serial number and variable data, and verifica­
tion of the printed information.
Serialization + aggregation (or e
­ Pedigree—
U.S. term)—Full proof of origin through an
electronic pedigree of the product at each
packaging level and serialization of each
packaging level.
Seidenader operates in this pharmaceutical
industry and is subject to the strict regulations
with regards to its own processes. It needs
to provide full transparency and traceability.
Managing 80 projects per year, many custom­
ized for particular clients, project engineers
would capture complicated user and develop­
ment requirements, up to 400-500 per proj­
ect, into Excel spreadsheets. Project engineers
might use different terms to describe require­
ments or go to varying levels of detail and with
no common knowledge base available it was
hard to produce project documentation to a
consistently high level.
At a Glance
Industry
Manufacturing
Location
Germany
Challenge
Seidenader operated a manual and error-prone
process to capture user and development
requirements and manage testing throughout
its product life cycle for Track&Trace solutions
in the strong regulated pharmaceutical industry.
It needed to prepare for an increase in work
load by improving its productivity, traceability,
and documentation management.
Solution
Micro Focus Caliber and Silk Central join an
­existing StarTeam implementation to form
an integrated development life cycle, based
on a common knowledge base.
Results
Testing is essential in the product life cycle
and this needed improving too. Test cases
were documented in Word files with no link to
requirements. The overall process was errorprone, manual and very labor-intensive. With
work load increasing every year, Christian Frenz,
Product Manager of the Track&Trace Business
Unit at Seidenader, knew things needed to
change: “Our clients depend on us to deliver
+ 40% productivity improvement
+ Reliable product documentation
+ Reuse of requirements and test cases
+ Effective integration for a streamlined development
process
“When we discovered that Micro Focus Caliber
and Silk Central could help us with our other issues,
and also integrate seamlessly with each other,
our decision was soon made.”
CHRISTIAN FRENZ
Product Manager of the Track&Trace Business Unit
Seidenader
www.microfocus.com
against tight deadlines with the absolute mini­
mum downtime to their environment. In order to
remain a trusted partner we needed to improve
our documentation, traceability and efficiency.”
Solution
Seidenader already deployed Micro Focus ®
StarTeam to manage all its software versions,
change management and release notes related
to this. The benefits of using StarTeam in part of
the process were clear to Mr Frenz: “Our prod­
uct release management was fully traceable
and StarTeam gave us a central documentation
repository to track all changes through product
development and delivery. When we discovered
that Micro Focus Caliber and Silk Central could
help us with our other issues, and also integrate
seamlessly with each other, our decision was
soon made.”
Micro Focus Professional Services was closely
involved in the implementation and added
some real value, according to Mr Frenz: “Our
Pro­fessional Services contacts helped us with
the technology and introducing best practice
processes to prepare us for expected growth.”
Caliber and Silk Central were implemented and
all user and development requirements are now
put into a standard language in Caliber, based
on a common knowledge base. Silk Central
automatically generates test cases for them.
Based on the requirements knowledge base,
it is much easier for Project Engineers to cre­
ate a gap analysis for customer requests and
Caliber produces a traceability matrix so that
the requirements can be transparently tracked
through to completion. Silk Central is used for
test case creation, as well as test planning, and
execution. It also tracks issues which are cap­
tured as StarTeam tasks.
Results
The common knowledge base acts as “the
sin­gle source of truth” and helps to avoid mis­
interpretation of requirements. Product docu­
mentation is generated fast and reliably and is
easily maintained. Testing has been streamlined
in the product development life cycle, and the
duration of each test case is instantly clear, so
exact deadlines can be committed to. The test
procedure is entirely paperless and the integra­
tion between Silk Central and StarTeam means
supporting documentation on the tracked is­
sues is generated automatically.
Mr Frenz concludes: “Using Caliber, Silk Central,
and StarTeam, we have already noticed an in­
crease in reuse of requirements and test cases
which was not possible before. We are able to
free up resources to cover our increasing work
load and I estimate that we will be able to im­
prove our efficiency by 40% within two years.
In practice this means that we can manage 110
projects with the same resources which is great
news for us and our clients.”
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